Abortion rate 'not cut by pill'

Making it easier for women to get emergency contraception has had no effect on cutting abortion rates, an expert has claimed.

Professor Anna Glasier, director of the Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust in Edinburgh, said there was an argument that "anything is better than nothing" for women wanting to avoid pregnancy.

But, she argued, the focus should be on getting people to take precautions before or during sex rather than afterwards.

The morning-after pill is available over-the-counter as well as through GPs, some A&E departments and sexual health clinics.

Figures out last October showed that the number of women buying the morning-after pill from chemists doubled in one year.

Writing in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ), Professor Glasier, who is also Director of Sexual and Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh, said emergency contraception had been heralded as the solution to rising abortion rates.

In the US, authors have claimed that 43% of the reported drop in abortions (110,000 between 1994 and 2000) have been down to emergency contraception, and that around 51,000 pregnancies were prevented by it in 2000/01.

She added: "Similar calculations would lead us to conclude that emergency contraception prevented more than 66,500 abortions in England and Wales in 2004.

"Yet, despite the clear increase in the use of emergency contraception, abortion rates have not fallen in the UK."

UK figures show that abortion rates have gone up from 11 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in 1984 (136,388 abortions) to 17.8 per 1,000 in 2004 (185,400 abortions).